Silver Arrow
by CaraLee934
Summary: In the middle of the events of Winter Soldier, Natasha takes a moment and remembers how she acquired a certain piece of jewelry. Rated for mention of bad guys who do bad things. Chapter Two: Natasha pulls herself together before setting off to do what needs to be done.
1. The Bathroom

**I do not own the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I do want a necklace like Natasha's though!**

**This is for the amazing Ani-maniac494. I hope you like it!**

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><p>As Cap bends over the Falcon file and Wilson bustles around his little kitchen, tapping at his coffee maker and then making a beeline for the fridge, Natasha murmurs a quick excuse and slips off down the hall to the bathroom. Once inside the (small, like the rest of the apartment) room she locks the door and turns, placing her back against it. The deep, shuddering breath sounds loud and pathetic, even in her own ears as she slides down the door to sit on the tile floor.<p>

It has been just over six years since her world was turned upside-down and she found a new reason for living. Six years since she looked at her death down the shaft of an arrow but was given life instead. Six years since she came to S.H.I.E.L.D., looking for some hope of making things right. A second chance.

And now it seems that her second chance, her last hope, was nothing more than just another lie in a blood-stained life full of them.

The gasping sob that echoes in the silence of the bathroom startles her. Surely she couldn't have made that sound? Almost without her knowledge, one hand rises to her throat as if to feel out the source of that broken noise, as her finger-tips brush against skin, her little finger tangles with something metallic.

Natasha no longer tries to deny her sobs, concentrating only on keeping them silent enough that neither Cap with his super-human ears (like hers, only better) nor Wilson will hear her. Her fist clenches tightly over the tiny silver trinket, barely any thicker than the chain it hangs from.

"_Пожалуйста_." She gasps through her tears and past the lump in her throat, begging a God she isn't sure she believes in. "Please. Don't let him be a lie too."

She closes her fist tighter and feels the bite of the arrow's point as it digs into the palm of her hand. This one little piece of jewelry, the only sentimentality she allows herself.

_It had been an ordinary mission at first. Reconnaissance, get in, get to the mark, get what they came for, get out, debrief with Agent Coulson, all with her back being watched by the same strange (crazy) American who had spared her life and recruited her to S.H.I.E.L.D. six months and twenty-three days ago. Incredibly ordinary. There wasn't even supposed to be any killing on this one, just retrieval of a rather expensive necklace, set with several rare diamonds, that had been stolen from its original owner (The Queen of a small, and relatively unimportant European country) and was to be auctioned off to finance the private army that Bernát Szabó was building. Unfortunately, the mission went off the rails somewhere in the vicinity of "get in"._

_ "I mean, you'd think that it appeared out of nowhere, except it's supposedly an entire country! No one except Phil has even heard of it before, and I think he might just be pulling our legs about that. It has to be a conspiracy. Not even _Fury_ had heard of it!"_

_ Not for the first time Natasha wondered what it was that made Agent Barton turn into a chatty, gossipy, (if extremely sarcastic) pre-teen girl whenever the coms went on. The man was rather reserved with most people, (Though she had seen him once, watching a football game with three other agents and Director Fury's secretary and he had seemed nearly perfectly relaxed then, being one of the most frequent contributors to the conversation.) but once his communicators were turned on (he had two for some reason that she hadn't been able to determine yet) he would not. Shut. Up._

_ With a sigh that was completely internalized Natasha continued scanning the ballroom she was in for her target. _There.

_"I have a visual." She murmured under her breath, gratified despite herself at how Barton instantly fell silent in acknowledgement. She lifted a champagne glass from a passing waiter as she wandered around the dance floor (No matter what the movies showed, going straight across it was for amateurs, not to mention rude) headed straight towards Szabó without looking like she even knew he was there._

_ "Is he as ugly in a tux as he was in that suit?"_

_ Barton's quip brought an un-welcome tilt to her lips, briefly betraying her amusement, if only to herself. Viciously, Natasha crushed that feeling. What is it about this man that is able to get under her skin? Why does he see through all the walls she puts up between her and the rest of the world, as though they were made of nothing more than thin-spun glass?_

_ It was unsettling. No one had ever understood her that way before._

_ She was now a yard away from the target and, with a perfectly timed stumble she was grasping his shoulder to keep herself upright, the flute of champagne spilled down the front of both his tux and her deep green evening gown, some of it ending up in her long, dyed-brunette hair._

_ "Oh!" She gave a squeak of dismay and stumbled backwards half a step, tottering on her low heels, the hem of her skirt brushing against her calves. The target caught her again._

_ "I am so sorry _Monsieur_!" She fluttered her hands nervously, nearly dropping the flute. Natasha Romanoff may have been a hardened assassin and spy who had spent almost exactly half of her twenty-four years rubbing shoulders with the elites as she marked them for death or interrogation, but Josiane Deforest was a nineteen year old girl from the French countryside, unaccustomed to the lavish event she had somehow found herself attending while a student at The Academy of Drama and Film in Budapest._

_ She babbled on in alternating French, French-accented English, and French-accented broken Hungarian._

_ "Mademoiselle, Mademoiselle." Josiane calmed down under the soothing words of the event's host._

_ For a man who trafficked in drugs, weapons, and human flesh, Szabó was quite the gentleman, the irritating little voice in her ear commented and for a moment Natasha fantasized strangling a certain archer with his own bowstring before Josiane accepted Szabó's offer of a handkerchief with a blush._

_ "_Köszönöm, Monsieur." _She clumsily wiped the front of her dress, the fabric tangled briefly with the beading down the side of her skirt, and dabbed at her hair with the silk square. "I am not used to these shoes. They are making me…How do you say? _Ügyetlen_? Clumsy, yes?"_

_ "Not at all." Szabó said gently, in a tone calculated to sooth. Natasha knew, she had used that voice many times right before she slit a man's throat. "Truly, you need not worry about it Mademoiselle…"_

_ "Oh!" Josiane blushed again and dropped a quaint little curtsy as she extended her hand, peeking up at the man from beneath her bangs. "Joséphine Deforest, _Monsieur_."_

_ Instead of shaking her hand, Szabó dropped a kiss on the air above Josiane's knuckles. "Ah, like the great empress of old. _Enchanté mademoiselle_ Joséphine. I am Bernát Szabó."_

_ Josiane's eyes widened in shock. "_Monsieur_ Szabó. I…I…"_

_ Szabó laughed and tucked her hand into the crook of his arm, escorting her towards a chair near the door to one of the balconies. "Think nothing of it _Mademoiselle_ Joséphine. It is not every day that I meet such a lovely young lady. It is well worth the price of a little champagne. And please, call me Bernát."_

_ "Josiane." Josiane squeaked out, glancing up through her lashes. "Everyone calls me Josiane."_

_ It had seemed to be going so well. Szabó took the bait that night, and had invited Josiane to return to his mansion for a less formal dinner party in three days' time._

_ Young, beautiful, unattached and alone in a foreign land…Josiane was the perfect target for the trafficker._

_ Unfortunately, Szabó had proved to be much more cunning than even Coulson had anticipated._

_ Three weeks later, after a missed extraction, and blown covers that proved to have never been successful in the first place, and a dozen little faces full of fear, and…Even now, after some five years, Natasha still can't bear to think long of what had happened in those three weeks…she and Clint (Because he was Clint after that. Not just Barton.) Huddled together beneath the counter of a looted jewelry store. Clint, white-faced, bruised, battered, and spattered with blood, both his own and others', cautiously probing at his side with gritted teeth, trying to determine if the bullet-wound there was turning septic. She, barely breathing as she passed in and out of consciousness beside him, the consequence of both the remaining traces of the drugs in here system as well as the blood loss from the many cuts on her limbs, chest, and back, administered with surgical precision. Not her face though. They hadn't wanted to damage her face. (Clint's interrogators hadn't cared about his face, it was just as torn up as the rest of him.)_

_ "Hey, Tasha, you with me?" (He'd stopped calling her Romanoff and started calling her Tasha, like she'd called him Clint.)_

_ She'd tried to say something, but hadn't managed anything other than a low moan. One more humiliation to cap off the others. It had been seven years since she hadn't been in control of an interrogation outside of her superiors at the Red Room, but with Szabó…she'd _never_ been in control. She'd shivered as the silence outside the shop was shattered by the sounds of their pursuers approaching, talking into their radios, telling their supervisors that they had lost the trail, the beams from their flashlights passing over the shop's interior.  
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_ The three men, at least, she'd thought there were three, it had been hard to tell, even for her, in the state she had been in, had stood in front of the shop for what seemed like ages before they had moved on. She had heard Clint release a breath next to her ear._

_ "Are they gone Tasha? Can you tell?"_

_ She'd managed to turn her head to face him and grunt an affirmative before something occurred to her._

_ "W-why? Ask?" She tried to ignore how proud of herself she was for managing those two, stuttered words. His face was barely visible in the sparse light provided by the moon and streetlights._

_ He didn't reply at first and she'd wondered if she'd only imagined asking._

_ "I can't hear."_

_ She blinked at him. Unsure of what he meant.  
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_ "My ears have never been the greatest, but I was able to get buy until my eighth op for SHEILD. I let off a sonic arrow and wasn't able to get far enough away in time. It blew out almost all of the hearing I had left. S'why I have two comms. They're hearing aides." There was movement that suggested he'd shrugged a little. "They smashed 'em when they nabbed me."  
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_ He grinned weakly at her, there was blood on his teeth from his busted lip, visible in the poor light as a dark smear. "Cramped their questioning style a bit when I couldn't even hear most of what they asked me."_

_ Natasha thought that, if she could move, she would have smacked him. Or kicked herself. Now that she thought about it, a lot of little things about him made sense, the occasions she had seen him seemingly ignore someone, the way he always had his back to a wall, in a way that she didn't, how he would track conversations with his eyes. The drugs must have been wearing off more. She was actually able to form coherent thoughts._

_"Your lips are really easy to read though, you enunciate well, even drugged which really isn't-"_

_ "Why did you come for me?" she'd blurted, somehow managing to grit the words out clearly past the pain and wooziness. "Could gotten clear. Made extraction."_

_ In the darkness she hadn't been able to see his face as he shifted uncomfortably. She knew he was thinking of the past three weeks. She'd been a prisoner for 19 days, he'd been a prisoner for 17. Because he'd come back for her. Instead of leaving. Instead, they had actually gotten to know each other in ways that very few people did. And Natasha had been frightened. For as long as she could remember, she had been alone. She hadn't cared about anyone. But there had never been anyone like him before._

_ "Ow!" His startled, loudly whispered exclamation had made her flinch. "What the…" He'd shuffled around a bit before he laughed quietly, though still a bit louder then Natasha was comfortable with. "Well I'll be."_

_ She'd had to squint to make out the object that he held up above their heads, hers tucked onto his shoulder, his laid on top of hers._

_ It was a necklace, glinting in the spare light, silver chain and a small silver shape suspended from it. It had taken time and focus but Natasha finally had seen what the shape was through her blurry vision._

_ A tiny silver arrow._

_ Clint had laughed again and gently fastened the trinket around her abused neck._

_ "There. Now you'll have something to remind you." He gently touched the arrow where it rested just below the hollow of her throat. "I'll always come for you."_

Natasha's sobs abate as she clenches the arrow tightly. That hadn't been the end of what would ever after only be referred to as "Budapest", the evening spent huddled in the abandoned, looted jewelry shop had been followed by hours spent limping through the city, being patched up by each other and the retired veterinarian they had stumbled across. Days and nights of hiding and hurrying to the safe house Clint had in the area. (Natasha had had one too. So had S.H.I.E.L.D. But they'd gone to Clint's, Because Natasha's was too far away and S.H.I.E.L.D.'s…well, someone had sold them out.) Clint's deafness had only been the first of many secrets they'd shared in that time. Before Budapest, their relationship had been distant and…complicated. He'd felt responsible for her, he'd brought her in after all. But in that city it had grown into something more.

And she had kept the necklace.

She'd taken it off sometimes, for most missions that would end in deep cover or extreme likelihood of "being interrogated". She hadn't been wearing it when she'd received that bone-chilling call from Coulson.

It had been at Clint's apartment in New York and she hadn't been able to get it back until after the battle. After they'd sent Loki and the Tesseract back to Asgard.

And then they'd been split up, Strike Team Delta reformed into something different. The WSC had always hated them, Clint especially, the two of them together most of all, and they had put him under probation and intense surveillance. She'd been paired with Steve and a bunch of goons, and Clint…Clint had been whisked off to the far corners of the globe, running mission after mission. (Except he called them ops, because he might be a spy and an assassin now, but he had once been a soldier. Like Coulson. Like Fury. Like Steve and Wilson.)

No matter what the mission, she hadn't taken the necklace off since. She supposes, in a way, it is her wedding ring. They hadn't had a legal ceremony, not under their real names anyway, if you didn't count that fact they had been married four and a half times while maintaining a cover, (once the ceremony had actually been conducted by Coulson, who had enjoyed it way too much.) but they had made promises to each other. Somehow though, that first one has always seemed the most important. A promise that he had often filled for her, and she for him in turn. Because what most people call "love" is for children, but their promise runs deeper.

"I'll always come for you."

Natasha Romanoff draws a deep breath and wipes the traces of tears from her face.

She has a mission to complete for now. Later, when this is over, she will look for the other half of her battered and broken soul, and hope she finds him alive and that he was not just another lie.

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><p><em><strong>So, yeah, I'm still mildly upset at the complete lack of even a mention of Hawkeye in Cap 2, but Natasha's necklace sort of makes up for it, don't you agree?<strong>_

_**Also, yes, I did make a poke at the fact that people are always making up tiny little European and African countries, especially in comic books.**_

_**Please feed Bob! Reviews make him very, very happy, and I very much appreciate feedback and constructive criticism!**_

_**Speaking of Bob, he is now my avatar! isn't he gorgeous! That picture was drawn by my eleven year old brother after he asked me a bunch of questions about what Bob looks like. It took him 20 minutes, I kid you not.**_


	2. The Safe House

**This is more of a teaser than anything I suppose. I have a full-length fic (ten chapters) in the works for the aftermath of Winter Soldier. In the meantime...**

_**I do not own the Avengers. So much would be different if I did!**_

**Warning: Refers to the Red Room program. With all that implies. Includes explicit (but not graphic) statements of the murder of children.  
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><p>As Natasha walks away from the graveyard, from Steve and Wilson, she finally allows herself to begin considering possible places to find Clint. He's been erratic since New York, closing even her out most of the time, (not that they have been allowed to see each other much) so it isn't as easy as it would have been a year and a half ago. Being unmade changes people, changes them from deep inside. It shatters you into millions of tiny little pieces and no matter how many of them you are able to gather back up and glue together again, you are never the same. She had had time to put herself back together, find out who she was, between her defection from Красная комната, her time working freelance, and her recruitment into S.H.I.E.L.D. She had been able to patch the pieces together. She'd had help, from Coulson, from Fury, and most of all from Clint. Clint who understood her in ways that no one else ever has. (There aren't really that many reformed former teenage assassins out there. Former teenagers. Still assassins.)<p>

Clint hasn't had that, hasn't been permitted to have that. She feels a brief flash of anger at the World Security Counsel, but they are mostly dead now, so it is pointless and fades as quickly as it appeared. Being angry at the dead, however well deserved the anger might be, is a waste of energy better directed elsewhere.

She manages to busy her thoughts with plans and practicalities until she is hidden away at the little safe house in Pearl River that they got together. There, she opens the door to the closet in the "spare" bedroom. (The master is too big for this purpose) walks in, shuts the door behind her, and huddles in the dark, allowing the past couple of days to wash over her.

First the death of Director Fury, no matter that it turned out to be faked. Fury was to her almost what Coulson had been to Clint. A much more professional relationship but nonetheless, everyone had known that she was Fury's, and Clint was Coulson's. When Fury had a bad feeling, it was the Black Widow that was sent to investigate. When Coulson had a hunch, Hawkeye would be dispatched to follow it up on the increasing number of occasions when Coulson wasn't able to go himself.

And then Coulson had been killed and Clint sent away and it seemed that Fury had followed in Coulson's footsteps and Natasha had been left without an anchor. She had still been reeling from the loss and the discovery that the agency to which she had pledged herself, heart and soul, had been built on a lie and concealed a monster when the metal arm had reached through the window and yanked Sitwell from beside her.

She had frozen in terror for one split second before launching herself over the seat and into Steve's lap and she knew that the hesitation could have been fatal.

But she never had expected to see…_Him_ again. And certainly not like that.

She had feared the officers of the Red Room yes, but it was a different sort of fear. Before the Hulk, there had been only one person that could leave little Natalia Alianovna Romanova a shuddering wreck of pure, primal terror. That could reach beneath Чёрная вдова and find Natashka, someone who left her so hopelessly outmatched as to make struggle laughable.

Зимний Солдат. The Winter Soldier. Now known to be what was left of James Buchanan Barnes. And what made it worse, so much worse, was the creeping knowledge of what the presence of the Winter Soldier in her fuzzy, early memories meant.

In leaving the Red Room and joining S.H.I.E.L.D., she had merely traded one branch of H.Y.D.R.A. for another.

When Black Widow candidate Четырнадцать had first met the man with the metal arm she hadn't known who he was, all the ten year old child had known was that he was a new face in the training pens, not the usual parade of trainers or the other girls. She remembered thinking that he was different from the other adults. He had the same blank look on his face that a few of the older girls did. The look that she herself had not yet acquired but would a matter of months later. The adults treated him differently then they treated each other too. They treated him more like one of the girls, barking orders and being generous with their fists.

He wasn't one of _Them_. He was one of them.

Except he was a trainer too. They would bring him in regularly to fight with the more advanced students, when Natasha had survived her first series of injections at age twelve-she-thinks after her first kill, she'd become part of that group.

He'd been brutal, an emotionless machine. There to pound them into the ground and see if they got up again. And none of them were able to do anything, despite the version of the serum running in their veins. Seven of the girls had died at his hands, Natasha had been terrified that she would be the eighth.

There had been more, he had been a constant until she left when she was eighteen, struck out on her own. They had sent him for her once, when she was twenty. She'd barely made it out. She hadn't seen him since.

Until his arm reached through the window and killed Sitwell before moving for her.

She takes a deep breath, inhaling the scent of the few clothes in the closet. The home-smell of Clint.

And then she allows her control to break.

An hour later she emerges from the closet, her eyes red and her throat raw from the release of the terror and worry and pain of the past few days, all let out at once. She walks straight into the master bedroom and collapses onto the bed.

She wakes thirty-four hours later and heads for the kitchen.

Silently, she cooks enough pasta for two, pulling the jar of homemade spaghetti sauce from the cabinet. (One of the neighbors is a sweet little old lady with a garden and a few fruit trees. They'd helped her with canning last summer and she had paid them in goods. Clint likes the plum jam best. She likes the tomato sauce.)

She eats on autopilot, before washing the pots, pans and dishes and leaving them in the dry-wrack as she heads to the bathroom.

She strips and steps into the shower, scrubbing down swiftly under the hot water and working the lather of shampoo through her matted hair. (It loses some of its straightness and curls up, just a little.)

An hour later she is walking out the door, hair in a ponytail, dressed in casual jeans and a simple blouse. She has rested and eaten and cleaned up. Now it is time to go find Clint.

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><p><strong><em>Pretty much, this comes from the fact that I re-watched Winter Soldier recently and couldn't get over the fact that we haven't seen Natasha that terrified outside of the Hulk incident.<em>**

**_So this happened._**

**_The Russian is..._**

**_Red Room_**

**_Black Widow_**

**_Winter Soldier_**

**_Fourteen (I think. Maybe sixteen. Some number that I am too lazy to look up.)_**

**_Please review! Bob hungereth!_**

**_And watch for Aftermath, also known as "Tony Decides That The Avengers Should Re-Assemble. Easier Said Than Done."_**


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